Sweet Little Lullaby
by Solus Nemo
Summary: A sweet little lullaby to sing when the wolf is at the door, a sweet little lullaby to coo while fear dances with enclosing shadows, a sweet little lullaby to hum whilst evil devours your soul.
1. One

**Title: **Sweet Little Lullaby  
**Author: **"Solus Nemo"  
**Summary:** A sweet little lullaby to sing when the wolf is at the door, a sweet little lullaby to coo while fear dances with enclosing shadows, a sweet little lullaby to hum whilst evil devours your soul.  
**Author's Note:** Came to me while I was listening to the new Queens of the Stone Age album, the one I finally bought a few days ago before this cold came up and bit me in the ass.

Rating for violence, adult language and themes.  
**Disclaimer:** I don't own "Supernatural" or anything affiliated with it (the WB does), but if I did I would have had Jensen Ackles locked in my closet a long time ago, with a light forever shrouding half his face in blackness – because he looks best that way. Mm'hm, he does. Now, I'm getting warm, but maybe that's this infernal sickness.

**Chapter One**

_**And as the story begins a bright summer's day blooms before thee in the quiet mind of child**  
_

_Storms were nothing to be afraid of, but apparently Trude McFarland missed that memo because she could think of nothing better to do at the moment than to bury herself under the covers at the foot of her bed and hum as loud as she could. Unfortunately, with the storm being right above her head it seemed, her show tune humming wasn't loud enough to quell the thunder clapping._

_It was absolutely ridiculous, her being afraid of a little storm such as this – she wasn't a kid anymore, but a girl now, one tall for her age – but reminding herself of the gift her Jolly Green Giants of parents gave her didn't make the storm any less of a reality. Lightning still burned her shut eyelids with white flare, thunder still rattled the framed pictures on her walls, and that damned Johnny wouldn't leave her alone._

_Setting aside the fact that her parents would take away her dessert privileges if they ever found out their little Trude said 'damned', Johnny had been pestering her since before the thunderstorm had even begun – a long time now – and didn't show any signs of quitting._

"_Oh, Trude Trude Trude," he sang to the tune of the Dreidel Song, "come see what I have done. And if you hurry to get there, you'll have lots of fun." He laughed harshly and, like he did for the past hour and a half, started his song back up again. It didn't matter that Trude had stopped talking to him, denied the very fact that Johnny existed at all, because he just wouldn't stop until he had his way._

_Oh, Trude Trude Trude (she was getting it stuck in her head now), didn't like Johnny anymore. She regretted ever playing with him, ever befriending him and defending him when her stupid snot-nosed sister (girls could still say stupid and snot-nosed because her sister _wasn't_ very smart and her nose _was_ filled with snot) called him imaginary. Johnny wasn't imaginary, no, not at all, but Trude wanted to believe he was. Maybe if she believe she was imagining him, like a loony in the crazy farm, maybe he'd go away and never bother her again._

_Johnny, still singing his annoying little verse, gave a good tug to Trude's quilt, but she held fast onto it so he wouldn't tear it from her head. She didn't want to have to see him smile. God, that smile. If smiles could be pure, unfiltered evil, that's what his was. But of course no one would agree to that because Johnny was _imaginary.

"_Trude! Troo-dah!" Johnny yelled, in his best whiny tone of voice. "Come see what I have done, Trude!"_

_She suddenly wished not for the storm to be over or for Johnny to let her alone, but for it to be a Sunday afternoon so she could hop in the backseat of Uncle Monty's car and drive around the countryside with the wind blowing through her hair._

"_TRUDE!"_

"_Go away," she whimpered. "I don't wanna see."_

"_That hurts, Trude," Johnny stated curtly. "I thought you were my friend."_

_Trude had to turn her head, she couldn't breathe with her nose so firmly crunched against the mattress. "I wanted to be, but not anymore. So just leave me alone."_

"_No. Not until you've seen what I've done. You're going to love it, Trude, trust me." He laughed again, sent more shivers down her spine than the lightning crashes._

"_Go. Away," Trude demanded firmly. It sounded so strange coming from such a small girl, though tall for her age. "Leave me alone."_

_Johnny didn't answer, didn't say anything at all this time. In fact, even the storm seemed to have listened to Trude because the entire world suddenly... went out. _

_The silence was such a shock Trude thought she'd gone deaf, but did your ears tingle when you go deaf? Slightly filled with the urge to move, but with most of her body still locked stiff with anxious fear, Trude slipped a hand to her only free ear. She felt and, most importantly, heard her fingers slide against her skin and a few stray strands of hair._

_Just in case she needed more proof of her hearing, in those seconds where her hands were otherwise not interested with locking down the quilt around her head, something grabbed a hold of said quilt and ripped it from her body just as the storm came back to the world with a vengeance._

_Sight was absolutely terrifying._

&&&

The sun was bouncing off chrome, a blinding lantern of heat, but that didn't stop salivation.

"Oh, baby," Dean breathed, voice thick with sensuous wonder, as he tapped the palm of his hand against the steering wheel of his Impala. "Hon, I think we just found yourself a mate."

After throwing a quick glance at the passenger seat to see if his brother Sam was indeed still asleep, Dean opened the creaky driver's door and clamored out of his Black Beauty in an awkward cross between tripping and running. He didn't bother to close the door behind him (let every mosquito in the Midwest pile in for a cruise!), just kind of groped blindly at the air in front of him, in a way testing the reality of the moment.

Drawn to this new car like moth to flame, hazel eyes shinning brighter than the aforementioned lantern of heat, the eldest of the Winchester brothers smiled – more like _leered_ – at the automobile parked only a few inches from the front bumper of his pride and joy. Really, this pin-up of a car was the only reason Dean stopped driving; he couldn't gawk and keep in the right lane at the same time. Actually, he was confident he very well could, but he wasn't about to try for risk of driving into a federal mail box and ruining a stand up paint job – on his car, not the mail box.

"Yeah, girl, if there ever was one this is it. Damn, if this was a woman..."

He had arrived at this awesome spectacle by now, ran his hands along the warm painted sheet metal of the hood, up the curve of the front window. Usually Dean wasn't so insensitive to the feelings of his car, but for now it was simply going to have to deal with him caressing this other classic.

It was his car's twin (if it had been anything other than an Impala Dean wouldn't have stopped to spit on it; flashy was the only thing that caught his eye), but like any set of twins there were some differences. For instance: this 1967 Chevrolet Impala wasn't a hardtop, it's black cloth convertible top was folded down and pocketed away. But other than that and the fact that this owner had collector plates, the two cars were hard to tell apart by anyone who didn't have half a brain – it helped, too, that Soft Top was immaculate, down to the original tires.

He could have been making Caveman-ish noises as he ran his hands over every inch of that car, much like a blind man downloading all the features of his wife through his fingertips, which would explain why the woman in the shot gun position of the car looked at him like he had finally flown right over the cuckoo's nest.

"Can I help you?" she asked, over-plucked eyebrows disappearing into nicely shaded blonde locks.

"Just admiring your car," Dean replied, voice only slightly less husky than before.

The girl, somewhere in her early twenties, shifted against the leather upholstery and folded her arms on top of the door, rested her chin at the cross her wrists made. Hopefully no looking-for-some-fun poltergeist would come along and bring up the window, scare the girl and in effect smack Dean in the side of the head or, worse yet, the goods when she threw the door open to run away.

She said, through a small smile, "I can tell, but it's not my car. It's my sister's." Blondie sighed at that statement, blew some of her bangs toward the Heavens. "She's in there–" she tilted her head in the direction of the building behind her "–dropping something off for work. I didn't want to come along, but now I'm glad I did."

On a normal day Dean would've been all over this one, but – come on! – this was so totally not a normal day. What _was_ a normal day anymore, anyway? It's not like he'd have the time to do anything with this chick even if there wasn't a second Black Beauty sitting before him.

"Not a speck of rust, and you're in Ohio. _Ohio_, this by all rights should be a road salt magnet."

"Climate control garage, something like that," the girl said softly, apparently disappointed Dean wasn't paying attention to her. "I don't know, it's not like I'm allowed to go in there. It's _padlocked_."

"Not a dent, not a scratch."

"Doesn't even let me breathe on the thing too hard, like I'm sure she'd think you're doing. Christ, it's just a car. Our uncle let me touch it. It's not like I'm going to make the thing explode if I put the key in the ignition and not her."

Dean stood up, looked down into the roomy cabin, at the pristine condition of it all. "I don't know, I'm like that with my little brother, too. First time I let him take over mine, he drives it into the living room of a house. Great parking, though, got it right in the center of an area rug, but he took out one of her poor headlights."

"I'm sorry to hear that," someone behind Dean offered. "That just kills value."

Turning around, Dean met a woman better suited for Sweden than Ohio (tall, blonde, blue eyed, just like her sister but with more realistic eyebrows). "I _know_," Dean stressed. "You try to tell that to the kid, but he just doesn't get it. He doesn't seem to care that my baby's molested now, that its days of being 100 percent original are gone, over, kaput. It makes me feel icky."

The woman laughed kindly, handed a manilla folder with a big, scribbled T name on it to her sister and walked around to the driver's side of the car. She didn't get in, but placed her fingers on the door handle and looked at the other Impala. "At least they did a good job, huh?"

Dean smiled. "Thank you." In truth, he couldn't get a bagel out of a toaster without nearly killing himself, but any moment to gain a few more swoon worthy manly points...

And it worked. While Blondie the Eldest smiled back at Dean, close to melting, the over-plucked younger Blondie was past the stage of turning to pudding in her seat.

Just as he was about to make his move, Sam decided to disagree with his brother's search of a soul mate for his car and picking up some ladies in the sincerest way possible: he screamed. It was his most blood curdling to date and _totally_ cramped Dean's style.


	2. Two

We're just going to pretend like I _didn't_ have to go fishing for a new explanation to my story because it _wasn't_ stolen from me by the script writers of a little show we won't name on an episode we won't discuss. 

**Chapter Two**

_**But thine life lies broken on the headstone of a fairytale.**_

It was too good to last anyway, that wonderful lusty glow of finding a car just as beautiful as the one he was sitting in, jeans and t-shirt sticking to the sun heated leather. Dean cocked his head, raised his eyebrows as he stared through the windshield at the two sisters talking – most likely about how fucking weird the Winchester boys were, how the world "freak" should be tattooed to each of their foreheads for the entire world to know not to get too close to them – but maybe they weren't. Maybe they were pondering the notion of chipping in to buy Dean some WD40 for Black Beauty's doors because Lord knew it wouldn't do any harm now. Or maybe they were debating what to wear to the town centennial on Friday night, the one as advertised on the large banner hanging across main street.

Yeah, right.

Sighing as silently as he could, Dean turned his head to look at his brother.

Poor little Sammy, crumpled there in his bucket seat looking as pale and gaunt as ever, rubbing his right temple like if he didn't his brain would come oozing out of his ear. His left arm, the one recently injured in a hunting accident, lay slacken across his lap. Dean all but stifled down the urge to add strangulation marks to his brother's list of adjectives; if the kid didn't talk soon Dean'd surely scream.

Sure, he had a devil-may-care attitude about everything, but that didn't mean he wasn't at that very moment longing to know something about what the hell was going on with his brother. He was starting to kick himself for ever wordlessly telling Sammy that he could take his time, collect himself, and then explain what happened. He'd never get the whole story, so it was relatively pointless to not squeeze the story out of his younger brother's pores.

Sam, remaining in his quiet calming down stage, seemed to almost want that to happen. But since he was a good half foot taller than Dean and by some fluke of nature ever got to arrange himself in the perfect position at the perfect time, and with Dean liking his studly neck just the way it was, he went back to observing the goings on in the world outside his car's windows.

The sisters, still locked in their feverish conversation about centennial attire but most likely not, were good-natured enough. They had asked if Sam was alright, but naturally didn't ask if _Sam_ was alright because they didn't know his name – or Dean's name for that matter – which was why after the casual "yeah, my brother's fine, just a little jumpy" lie came the introductions.

Jo (short for Josephine) was the one in desperate need of eyebrow plucking classes, the young boy crazy wild sister who didn't know jack about cars and liked it that way. In five seconds flat she'd explained how she was living not with her sister but in the same apartment building on the same floor two doors down from her sister and was taking evening courses at a school for cosmetology in the closest big city, but her Cocker Spaniel Moxy didn't enjoy that very much.

The older, more automobile savvy sister (who on closer inspection worked for the local newspaper as what, Dean didn't know) kept it simple. Her name was Trude and she thought it very nice to meet them, the brothers, and Dean believed it because she said it so warmly.

Why they hadn't rolled away yet, tried to put as much distance between them and the crazy Winchester brothers with that exquisite example of machinery as they could was anyone's guess. They were probably thinking about it, though.

"I could feel it."

Dean was so wrapped up in convincing himself of the will to ostracize in people he had almost forgotten he had been waiting for Sam to speak about his nightmare. He nearly broke his black twisting himself around to face his brother so quickly.

"What do you mean you could feel it, Sammy?"

"I could feel it," he restated weakly.

Well, this was sure going nowhere fast.

Sam took his right hand away from his head, brought it down to hover above his lap, and studied it with such an intense gaze it was as if he was trying to destroy the thing using only his mind. "The fire," Sam wanted to explain. "I could feel the fire this time. _Feel_ it melt my hand, my skin when I reached for her. I could hear her screaming for me to help her; the blood stung when it fell on me and I looked up and saw her there, reaching for me and yelling for me to help. I just couldn't get to her through the flames. I was so close, my fingers brushed against hers, but I couldn't save her. My hand was... was melting, but I still tried to get to her. It hurt so bad, almost as bad as losing her, but I still tried even when my hand was nothing but bone. I could feel the fire's kiss, Dean." That's what he wanted to say, but instead he shook his head.

Dean, not one especially gifted with other worldly powers such as mind reading, gritted his teeth and moved his line of vision elsewhere. Why didn't Sam ever tell him anything? He wouldn't have brought Sam along if he didn't feel like he could trust him, so why didn't Sammy ever seem to get that message? He just wanted to be able to understand, that was all.

He wasn't going to push the issue, though. The last thing Dean needed was a snubby passenger who refused to change out the tapes while on the road.

"When was the last time you ate?"

"I'm fine," Sam replied defiantly.

"A person who's fine doesn't scream like his gonads are being chopped off. You haven't eaten since last night, we're stopping someplace and getting food."

"I'm not hungry," Sam continued to protest.

Dean opened the driver's door. "That's okay if you're not hungry. I'll just get a screwdriver from the trunk, some Plumber's Helper and shove the food down your throat."

Sam rolled his eyes. "Fine, I'll eat."

Smiling, throwing an "Attaboy" into the car, Dean stepped back out onto the sidewalk and took advantage of the fact that Jo and Trude hadn't run off to hide in the woods. "Hey, ladies, can you point us in the direction of a diner or something?"

Jo looked up so fast it was a wonder she didn't get whiplash, but she didn't say anything. Gave some _very_ suggestive looks that would make Paris Hilton blush (ah, the perks of being so damn handsome), but didn't answer Dean's question.

Caught a little off guard by Jo's unrelenting overtness, Dean tried his luck with Trude, who – like Dean – was now pretending like Jo wasn't really there.

"Just around the corner on the north side of the street is Goosey's. You might want to hurry, though, because they lock the door when the cases are emptied in the afternoon rush," she explained. "If it is closed, then a few doors down is Harry's. Just don't eat the cottage cheese, whatever you do."

Sam nodded his thanks and began walking, but Dean straggled behind. He was overcome by the oddest sensation, a weightlessness, that continued to grow the longer Trude looked at him. It wasn't because she was beautiful – which she wasn't, enhanced even more so against Black Beauty the Sequel – but because of something else. It ended rather quickly when she looked at something behind him, but not before Dean might have heard something.

It could have been anything, he hadn't heard it that well and wasn't even sure he had heard it at all. It could have come from someone's cell phone or maybe the music from the children's ballet class (there was a hanging sign on a door to the building right beside him) drifted down from a poorly sealed window.

Whatever it was, it spooked Trude something awful, and all the color went from her face.

"Have a nice day, Dean," Jo said sweetly, then threw herself against her seat to sulk and brood about how much boys suck.

"See you around." Only he wished he wouldn't have to see Jo around, not if she was going to ignore the fact that Dean was the one who made the first move, always.

As he was moving away he waved to Trude, who didn't reply but seemed to mutter "oh, shit" under her breath. With an open mouth ready to injuire, Dean started to turn around, but thought better of it. If she had suddenly recognized that Dean had at one point in time been wanted for murder in St Lois, "died", and had somehow come back from the grave before her very eyes he didn't want to hang around for the police to come.

When he caught up with Sam, his stomach seeming to have come back to him, Dean spoke softly so as not to be overheard by a trash can or random alley cat. "I think we should get out of here. After we eat, I mean, because she might've recognized me."

"Maybe she did, you've been with _how_ many women in _how_ many states after all? Don't answer that," he added quickly.

Dean har-harred. "I thought you'd be a little worried about this."

"We're in a small town in Ohio, Dean. There are, what, less than eighteen-hundred people here and unless they can somehow get St Louis local news they won't know you were a murder suspect. She probably just saw a spider or something. A lawn gnome, people are afraid of them."

"It didn't look like she saw any lawn gnome to me," Dean replied uneasily.

Sam stopped walking, looking a little crestfallen for having to see a closed sign in Goosey's front window. It was an act. Though he was hungry, he simply didn't want Dean plaguing him about his nightmare. "If you feel so strongly about it we can leave once we eat, which looks like it's going to be over at Harry's."

"Great. On the day I leave my Hazmat suit in the car."

"It won't be that bad."

Dean scoffed. "If a large blob of fungus starts hitting on me, we're leaving."

"Fungi."

"Whatever, same difference."

"Actually, it's not, really."

"Shut up, College Boy."

Sam, to his credit, smirked as he checked for traffic in the street and walked across it to the food establishment. He opened the door for his brother, just because it was easier that way, and looked back out onto the sleepy main thoroughfare as he waited for Dean to go inside the building.

As if by some work of fate, just as he turned around the Impala convertible, which really did look freakishly a lot like Dean's oh so beloved, came by on the street. Sounded just like Dean's too of course, but by the looks of it Trude was trying to break a land speed record. That set him a little on the edge, more so when Dean gave him that all knowing "I told you so" look.

Shrugging his brother's possible recognition off as some kind of last minute shopping exertion as women often do, Sam and his brother slipped inside the building to be met with AC and elegant yet drowsy room design.

Taking the led foot Trude's warning of the cottage cheese very close to heart, Sam and Dean were very selective as they stared down at the choices laid before them in the buffet line at Harry's Restaurant (after first paying for their meal, getting to the buffet table and gathering their plates and silverware, of course). Everything seemed as it should, but as they both knew seeing wasn't always believing.

The carrots were bright orange and cold, so they each loaded up on those, as was the same with the healthy looking cucumbers (they dared not take dip) and the bubbling and steaming rotini pasta bake, but the salad only looked like it would sneak by on a surprise exam.

Loaded up with their identical plates of food – neither one of them wanted to chance it with the chocolate pudding – they walked across the half empty dining area to a booth between two windows, just in case Trude really had recognized Dean.

There was an older couple sitting to their very far left at a table, but other than that there was no one in that portion of the restaurant. The brothers were free to talk, but quietly.

"Look," Dean said as he munched on a carrot stick and waved it at his brother, "you don't have to tell me anything you don't want to, what with the shape-shifting incident and all, but know I'd really appreciate it if you told me _something_. Even if it's 'Hey, Dean, I think my toes are turning purple with pink polka dots' I'd be happy."

Sam made a face as he waved his hand at the carrot sword, shooing it away. "Just because we're brothers doesn't mean I have to tell you everything."

"And I don't want to know everything. You can keep the order you wash yourself in the shower to yourself, but when it comes to more important things like your dreams I don't like being kept in the dark."

"They're _my_ dreams, Dean."

"But if they intrude into my daily activities I deserve some part to them too, you know. God, Sammy, this can't be healthy. Have you ever stopped to look at yourself? You're falling apart."

With a sigh, Sam began to poke at his lunch.

"I can still go _Christmas Story_ on you," Dean reminded. "Don't think I won't do it."

"Your children are going to hate you."

Dean finished off his carrot stick sword. "I can be cool, you saw how I was with Lucas. But back to our communication issues."

"Communication issues? You're making us sound like a dysfunctional couple, Dean!"

"Well, maybe we are," he countered. "I'm your brother, Sam, just in case you need reminding. I'm not going anywhere so unless you want to start treating my Black Beauty like she's worth I'm the only thing you've got before talking to your thumb."


	3. Three

**Chapter Three**

_**With this angel of mine no longer there to brighten their petals, the flowers around thine grave have turned to ash**_

Sam looked at Dean, whose eyes were wide in a mixture of shock and disgusted awe and whose mouth was open behind curled lips. The blonde – actually it was more of a dirty sand – nodded his head a fraction of an inch and moved his eyes back at the object between the brothers. Both of them were sitting in the booth at Harry's Restaurant, leaning toward each other with their elbows on the table and a stiff cloak of air surrounding them.

With an eye roll, Sam was the first to speak. "Dean–"

"Shh, don't make any sudden movements and we should be okay."

"_Dean_–"

He looked back up at his younger brother. "Sammy, I swear to you I saw it move."

"Then let's throw some holy water at it and get out of here, isn't that what you were pushing for earlier?"

"That was before we ran into rotini bake that doesn't know it shouldn't have a mind of its own."

Sam made a perturbed sound through his nose. "Right."

Dean, at last escaping the spell of a pasta dish that may or may not be alive, leaned back into the plush leather seats of his side of the booth. "Aren't you the one who always says, 'maybe this is our kind of problem?'"

"Yeah, am I, but we're not in a bad 1950's sci-fi movie here, Dean. This is 2005 and _The Blob_ still hasn't happened yet in the real world in case you haven't noticed."

"In our line of work it might yet and you know it."

"This is silly," Sam observed and sat up straight. "We're fighting about bad pasta when something even bigger might be going on, like you being discovered."

"Discovered?–" he grinned, elated "–Really? So you honestly do think _Days of Our Lives_ took my audition seriously? Oh, Sammy, that means so much to me, to know you have faith in me, you have no idea."

Sam groaned. "You really wear on my nerves sometimes, you know that?"

"Just doing my part," Dean replied proudly.

"Okay, so you're trying to send me to an early mental breakdown, fine, but this is neither the time nor the place. What if you're right?"

"About what? That I'm the handsome brother? Well, Sammy, I've known that for a long time now, but thank you for admitting your faults."

"What's gotten into you? The police might come busting through that door at any second and you're sitting there being, being…."

Dean smiled, his antics an effort to mask his unease. "Witty? Never knew I had it in me, did you?"

"To that extent, you actually not making cutsie remarks about naked Sorority pillow fights, no. But that's beside the point. I'm kind of worried, Dean, about Trude speeding off when we left."

"You said it yourself, this is a small town. If she went to the police, they'd have been here by now."

Sam shook his head. "Not unless this is one of those small towns in which there is no police station. If there's an emergency you need to go to the nearest town which has a police force. If that's the case we might still have a few minutes to run back to the car and kick some dust out of here."

For a brief moment Dean thought about divulging some information about what happened with Trude, but then turned the other way. If Sam wasn't going to tell Dean everything then it was only fair that Dean not tell Sam anything and everything. Teach the kid a lesson, why didn't he. "Yeah," he said. "You're probably right. Let's shake some tail before that rotini decides to see what we taste like."

Sliding out of the booth in unison, the brothers Winchester made their way to the entrance of Harry's Restaurant as casually as they could – no one ever suspected Joe Cool of being a once sought after murderer or of having a list of credit scams longer than the distance from Seattle to the former Soviet Union. It worked too, right up to the point of walking right out the main doors and down the concrete front steps.

"I'll be glad not to see the inside of that place again," Dean muttered, squinting against the light of the afternoon sun. He shuddered. "Bleck, I never ate so little in a place so full of food before in my life. Look at me, I'm wasting to skin and bone already! Next McDonald's we see, I'm pulling through the drive-through and ordering one of everything on the menu, and a nice apple pie for you too."

Sam was only half listening to his brother's complaints about what his lack of caloric intake was going to do to his physique (tactics such as this kept him sane on long car rides between hunting action. It was a wonder, the things Dean Winchester could talk about for hours straight, the man loved the sound of his own voice). Instead of diving deep into the conversation, Sam opted to let Dean talk himself out and only tossed in some "uh-huh"s and "yeah"s when an answer was expected of him.

He had been doing this since he was little, tuning his brother out, and so far to Sam's knowledge Dean never caught on to the fact that he'd have better luck talking to his car than to Sam – that Impala would probably say something even more cerebral in response. And like his younger years, when Dean was carrying on about whatever he was carrying on about, Sam would occupy himself with observation or kids' games.

Usually it wasn't anything in particular, something like counting cow passings under country roads or identifying road kill, but at this moment in time on this specific street something shook things up a bit. If Dean wasn't so busy yapping – God, that man could talk a mannequin's ear off – he'd have surely noticed what Sam was fixated on, so intently in fact that he came close to tripping over thin air.

As so happens in very small towns such as Dober, Ohio¹ the residents know all other residents, every fact down to why Mrs. O'Grady chose to have cats on her nightgown instead of Lilacs, her favorite summertime flower even though they give her nasty allergic reactions, and in very small towns no news might be better off than anything else. Because, you see, in very small towns even the best kept secret flies around to every door on the wings of a hummingbird. In no time at all, everyone in town knows you still sleep in footy pajamas. In efficient little towns like Dober news travels even quicker than the hummingbird because residents group together in gossip rings. Fascinating things, gossip rings, where dirty little secrets are swapped as plainly and casually as Grandma's sugar cookie recipe.

Sam was staring directly into the heart of one such gossip ring as he all but silenced the infernal low grade buzzing his brother was producing. If he knew anything at all about the anthropology of small towns, which he did, Sam would bet the devil his head that in that gossip ring Trude and Jo's speedy trip was or was being mentioned.

"I do my time in the gym, you know, I like to look the best I can, but how am I suppose to do that – look my best – when my stomach thinks my throat is cut? Now, I know I'm no wrestler or baseball catcher I'll admit, but I've got a little muscle going on and right now my guns are wasting away from that low quality meal I ate. I can't be a top notch 10 when all my muscle's gone away, can I?"

"Eh."

"I didn't think so. And looking at you, Sammy, God. You're a bean stalk – worse, what a bean stalk hopes to be when it grows up. It looks like a stiff breeze'll blow you over and that _lunch_ didn't help you at all. I know I'm the handsome one, but I'm comfortable enough with my masculinity to say that you aren't all that bad-looking. You're a geek, a nerd, but you've got that geeky charm about you if you know what I mean. The dark features, chicks go insane for dark features, and the fact that you have absolutely no problem in the height department doesn't hold you back at all. In fact, if your hair wasn't so…ick you could be an apprenticing Casanova."

Even if Sam had been paying attention, Dean jumped right back into speaking so soon that he wouldn't have been able to defend his signature hair cut.

"But don't get me wrong, Sammy, you'd never be a playboy because I know you don't ever want to be one. You aren't like that and, if you took the time to look at the way some girls stare at you, a lot of them respect that. See, you're the kind of guy they could see themselves settling down with – scary concept – and they go a little crazy. You know, their eyes get all shiny with their fuzzy thoughts of raising a puppy with you and everything…. Sammy?"

Hallelujah, he had finally noticed that Sam had stopped walking somewhere between playboy and respect.

"Sammy?" Dean said again, turning around in a semi-circle to see his brother standing in the middle of the street focusing quite powerfully on the group of women gathered at the stop sign a few feet away. "Come on, Sammy, you know I didn't mean to offend you."

"Oh, I know," he replied simply but not before walking rather empoweringly into the gossip ring in front of Mel's Comics, Sport Cards and Collectibles².

Dean, only slightly stunned at his brother's forthcoming behavior, followed Sam on close ties.

"Hello, ladies," Sam said cheerfully.

They all said hi, then went right back to their conversation.

"That McFarland girl's always been a strange child," an older woman in an Indians cap explained. "Since I've known her she's never not had that frightened expression in her eye, like she's constantly seeing something we can't. Talks to herself, too, and thinks we don't notice."

"I'm looking for a hardware store. My brother's car needs a new spark plug," Sam lied.

"Turn around, go down three blocks and turn left at Raddish. Pots of flowers hanging in front of the windows, can't miss it, but watch your head going in," another woman answered, thirty-ish with her brown hair pulled up in a bun. "Carl used to think something was wrong with her, what with her parents working all the time and all and not giving her the proper amount of attention, and he was even more convinced when they died like that. Poor thing, had to see them gutted alive when she was seven and look at her now, death magnet ever since. Now Herb's gone she's hardly got anyone left."

Sam, memorizing every word, every pause for breath and smallest flinch made, nodded. "Three blocks that way, left at Raddish? Okay, all right, thank you."

"You're welcome, sweetheart," came from the bun lady. But "You'd think Trude's doing this herself, wouldn't you? What with how it's always her who calls the police" and a laugh came from a low-pitched woman's voice as Sam was walking away.

He and Dean exchanged glances as they began sauntering in the direction of the hardware store, with that spark plug story being forced to walk all the way around the block to the car.

When they were far enough away from the gossip ring to speak normally, Dean shot another expression at Sam. "You think we might be going on a hunting trip, don't you?"

"I think so. It's worth a look, anyway. It might just be horrible black luck, but with the way she acted over there it would be prudent of us to check it out."

"There's something I need to tell you, Sammy, about when you were leaving. I was goggling at the car, that's why I wasn't walking with you at first, and something was reflecting in the paint. Some kind of figure that shouldn't have been there and when I looked at Trude, I felt like gravity suddenly wasn't in the equation anymore. There was humming too. I don't know what tune it was or who was doing it, but I realize it was humming now. It stopped when she looked away from me, at something behind me, and she looked positively terrified. She must've took off home or something when we were going into _that place_ with the evil pasta dish."

So much for teaching Sam a lesson, but it might be important to the case that quite possibly was developing and it was stupid, not to mention life threatening, to not bring up relavent factual information.

"We'll find out soon enough. Small towns don't have many roads, we'll be able to see the lights of the police cruisers somewhat easily."

* * *

¹ please note that I didn't take the time to hunt around the study for the Atlas and pulled a random town-ishy sounding name from the sky. 

² all businesses are taken from the actual places from Port Washington, Wisconsin, USA. So Goosey's (Gallery) really is a bakery, Harry's really is a restaurant, and Mel's is an actual comics and sport card place. Just doing my roll in boosting tourism.


	4. Four

**Chapter Four**

_**And the ravens have clouded the sky, so that the sun which once lit thine hair is now black**_

Sam was right in his assessment of Dober's streets, but when was the kid ever wrong? The fact that Sam was hardly if ever incorrect about anything was enough to make Dean's blood boil, but the events unfolding before him were sufficient in flushing his veins with ice water, buckets and buckets of ice water.

Pierre Street, on the outskirts of town, was where all the action was taking place. As Dean pulled Black Beauty to the curb under an ancient oak tree, he stared through the reflections of the police cruisers' lights at the ranch house mobbed by emergency personnel. It was nothing he hadn't seen before, but something about hearing the anguishing screams of Jo, something about seeing Trude sitting on the trunk of her car with her knees to her chest and muddy sneakers dirtying a fine paint job made him want to slit his wrists – the human suffering, not the dirt flaking off and adhering itself onto the other Impala though it was very much wrong.

Trude, understandably so for a woman who had to witness her parents slaughter, sat in a completely trance-like state as she answered a policeman's questions. She looked not only broken, dazed, but…practiced, as if she had done this so many times it was a routine.

If Jo was used to anything it was the screaming she contributed to the moments in which Trude slipped into an offbeat coma. Two police officers were trying to calm her down, or hold her steady long enough for a man in a white lab coat to appear out of nowhere and pump her full of sedatives, but she wouldn't hear of it; she wanted to yell, wanted to grab at her hair with shaking hands, and by Hell she was going to do it. Her knees buckled, too, when the EMS team wheeled the body bag out of the front door and to the waiting ambulance.

It didn't help the moment at all that this was happening on a bright, sunny summer afternoon with not a cloud in the blue sky. By all rights it should be nighttime and a thunderstorm should have been raging or at least a light drizzle, but this kind of weather made the situation downright strange and even more awkward than normal. Even the people in their yards, splitting blinds and curtains if they were stationed within their homes, surveying the actions the sisters took and stamping check marks onto their Approved Reactions of a Death sheets in broad sunlight was close to dark comedy.

But it was evident that the McFarland sisters found nothing amusing about Herb's death. Whether he was their brother or a cousin five times removed didn't matter, what did matter was the fact that something killed him – heart attack or evil paranormal force – and if what the women in the gossip ring said and what Dean recounted rang true Trude McFarland knew about it before anyone else.

Neither Sam nor Dean was holding the card of how Trude knew or why, but the most important thing at the moment was that something came over her and made her start up Soft Top and drive like a bat out of the underworld to this house. The fact that she had blood on her and Jo didn't said something else: one of them went further into the house than the other and Dean would've guessed that Jo was forced to stay out by the car while her sister ran into the house to check on the status of Herb.

But how did she know? Actually, Dean already knew that. Whatever force made him feel like he weighed nothing, whatever being made its presence known in the wax job of Trude's car, whatever _thing_ was humming told Trude what was going to happen. That had to have been it or she wouldn't have been so freaked out, wouldn't have said something so unlady like as "oh, shit". The better question: _What the hell told her?_

Dean had not a clue to that, but thought if maybe he started at Trude long enough, hugging herself so pathetically, he'd get the answer. Was he dealing with some kind of angel here? A poltergeist, a demon like the one who crashed those planes and the brothers had to exorcize, the ghost of a monkey pissed off for having to dance for quarters when it was alive? Currently there was no way to tell, because unless it showed itself or made contact with Dean again it could have been a stupid gnat for crying out loud.

Too bad he couldn't take his gun and shoot at it, that might help things along a little bit.

"Come on," Sam broke what little silence there was. "We're going to talk to the neighbors."

Dean could have kissed his brother for giving him an accuse to not focus on Jo's breakdown, but instead got out of his car and walked with him over to the closest lump of people to Herb's house. A man and young daughter of about thirteen, standing by a tractor mailbox and shaking their heads, still holding their gardening tools.

"Excuse us," Dean asked softly, "but what happened?"

The father, greying early for his age, moved his eyes away from the ranch house he shared a hedge fence with and to the brothers. "Came driving down the road like a maniac and barely shut the engine off before she was yelling at Josephine to stay in the car – we were planting some bulbs so we saw the whole thing – and ran inside the house. Nothing happened for a while, but when she came out with Herb's blood on her shirt sleeves that's when Josephine started acting up. Not long after the first of the police came."

For a thirteen-year-old the daughter was horribly short, but to make up for it she didn't destroy the English language like most of her peers. "Trude used to babysit me," she explained while craning her neck up to fawn over Sam, who completely missed the self-satisfied "Didn't I tell you?" look Dean gave him, "but not anymore of course. It's not that I don't like her, but she gives me the heebie-jeebies."

"Why?" Sam questioned politely, apparently using his nerdy good-looks to make her feel a little more comfortable, make him easier to talk to. "She seems like a nice enough person to me."

"Oh, and she is," the teenager agreed, "but she always seems to be bothered by something that's not really there. I never say anything about it to her because that would be rude, she might have a medical condition or something, and mentioning it might make her self-conscious. Lord knows if everyone in town thought she was loopy they wouldn't read her column and she works so hard on it."

Sam looked to Dean, then back to the girl. "That's very sweet of you…."

"Anna." She smiled shyly. "My name is Anna."

Dean, never one to like being left out of a conversation, leaned forward with his best swoon producing smile. "Such a pretty name for a pretty girl."

She blushed, but most likely would have giggled without any sign of stopping if the compliment had come from Sam who said, with a nod, "Thank you."

Together the Winchester brothers turned away from Herb's neighbors and made their way across the grass and through a rather large gap in the hedge with every intention of speaking with Trude about what really happened. How that was going to happen when every police station in each state of the union had a picture of Dean pinned to their bulletin boards was something they were going to have to find out as they went along.

It might have been a good sign that no one came running at them with batons at the ready when Sam and Dean came out of the hedge, stepped onto the concrete of the vast driveway, and it might also have been a good sign that neither of them was sprayed in the face with awesome amounts of pepper spray when they walked calmly to Trude's Impala. But taken into account the way the policeman talking to her looked at them when they came up to him and she those other two points seemed like one runt ant trying to keep a human dam from breaking.

With the nice policeman standing right there Dean didn't have the option of running away when Trude looked up at him, when he saw something dark pass not across her eyes but one of her dangling silver star earrings. It was creepy because by all rules of nature Dean should have been the only one to make a shadow like that dance across those earrings, but a.) the shadow came several seconds too late and b.) it was only her left earring and not her right (he knew because they rocked forward when Trude lifted her head and he could see both of them simultaneously). Gratefully, there was no humming accompanying that shadow and no sense of weightlessness.

"It's all right, Mark," Trude told the suspicious officer, "they're not strangers."

What was odder? The fact that Trude knew this policeman on a first name basis or how she barely knew Dean and Sam but didn't have them carted off the premises?

"They are to me, Trude, but if you say so…. I have everything I need here, I'll let you be now."

Trude, coming far enough out of her trance to smile softly at Mark the police officer, said a meek farewell to him. When he had gone, she said nothing to Sam or Dean and bade her time by staring at a fresh gasoline puddle on the driveway.

Sam was the one who tried to break the ice by explaining why they were there gently as he could. "We were passing through and saw the lights. Are you and Jo okay?"

It looked like Trude wanted to laugh there for a moment, but her face went back to being blank and she kept dissectingthat grease spot with her eyes. "We're fine, thank you, it's just…I came here with Jo and we found Herb, our loveable deadbeat cousin, in the hallway. Actually, I did. I made Jo stay in the car."

Dean sat down on the trunk beside Trude, more like leaned against it actually so he wouldn't damage it in any way, and watched the grease puddle with her. "Why?" After a long pause in which he received no reply, he tried a new tactic. "Sammy had a fire in his apartment a few weeks ago – seems like it's been months now. I had just left to go back to my car, drive off, but I turned around and when I busted open the door I just barely had time to pull him out of there…. It was like this voice in my head told me to go back, you know?"

Sam shifted his weight to his other foot, crossed his arms over his chest.

"Something like that," Trude replied. "Intuition."

The shadow now twisted across the face of her watch, Sam saw it, but there was no physical being in front of her.

"I'm a grief counselor," Dean fabricated suddenly. "If ever you want to talk about your feelings, about what happened in there, that voice in your head–" he slipped one of his emergency girl picking up numbers he kept in droves into her hand "–give me a call."

"Since when do grief counselors wear leather jackets, ripped jeans, and drive around in cherry Impalas?"

Dean smiled, stopped leaning against the trunk and out of mindless habit straighted out that leather jacket. "I like people to be comfortable with me so they feel more inclined to talk and if it means wearing ratty jeans and caressing classic cars so be it."

Trude might have smirked, even laughed, but the shadow now skipping across the jewels in her rings made her stop.

"I want you to call me, Trude. Everyone encounters shadows in their lives, demons that whisper things in our ears at night, but the trick is to defy them by living through them."

She met his eyes.

"Sam and I lost our parents, too, Trude so don't think I, we, won't understand you." He could feel Sam bristle as he said that, could see the look in his eyes in his mind: _"Dad's still alive! We didn't lose him too. Just shut up!"_

Trude, thinking over what Dean had said to her and finally making the connection between his choice of words and her little problem, nodded. "Alright, I will."

"That's a girl," Dean stated cordially. He apologized to Sam through his eyes, trying to communicate through their tied gazes that they were starting to get somewhere, but it didn't work so well. Sam was angry, his stare worse than anything the Ice Queen could come up with, and Dean could only frown.

Then something funny happened – funny strange, not funny ha ha.

Dean turned back to Trude to say good-bye, but when he locked on to her eyes he was losing weight at a rapid succession, so much so that he felt like if he didn't grab hold of something he'd float away like a balloon. He had nothing to hold on to and dared not risk grabbing at Trude because he might get himself thrown in jail for it. So he stood there, falling into her eyes which were wider than any Olympic sized swimming pool and bluer than Dober's sky.

The shadow crossed those eyes, darted from left to right, and brought with them that humming Dean had heard earlier. Only it wasn't humming, it was a song. The Dreidel Song of all things to sing, but there was a menacing quality to it and he couldn't make out the words. But he knew damn well that there was a kind of terrifying tone to it that would have made Dean wet his pants if it hadn't stopped just as suddenly as it had started.

Trude moved her eyes away from Dean same as last time this happened, to something behind him, and when he turned to see what she was looking at he was met with the vision of an oak branch breaking from the tree with a horrendously loud _crack!_ and crashing down onto his beloved.

As if a hot fireplace poker had sliced clean through it, Dean grasped at his heart with one hand, reached toward his automobile with the other. "My car," he croaked weakly. "My beautiful car!" He ran over to it like if he didn't the very fabric of the universe would unravel, like if he didn't that large, broken piece of oak would slice Black Beauty in half with the ease of a warm knife through butter.

Dean put his hands out to her, but kept pulling them away in such a manner one would have thought the car was radiating a thousand degree heat. But, though he was petrified of touching her and causing her to be razed more, Dean made a mantra out of the words "steel frame" and began repeating them over and over again, in a way begging to some higher power for the Impala's steel frame to have miraculously saved its engine.

Too shocked to cry, but with words rising to such heights in spite of that, Dean tried to comfort his car the best way he could. "It'll be okay, girl. We're going to get this off of you and you'll be all right." His voice clutched in his throat, proof he didn't believe his own words. But maybe….

At the angle the limb had fallen on it, it looked as though the Impala's frame _had_ absorbed the whole of the blow. The oak branch hadn't slid either, but remained lodged in the dent – dear, God, that dent! – on the roof; eighty percent of it was resting away from the engine.

It was with this realization that Dean noticed Sam and Trude standing on either side of him, Sam with his hand on Dean's shoulder.

Trude, for being both cursed and a death magnet, had the remarkable ability to bounce back to normalcy with the agility of a circus flea – that or she relished not having to face Herb's death. As she swatted at something to her right, make-believing it was a fly, she looked to the brothers. "If you can get the limb off her I can have a look at the engine. I used to be a mechanic before getting my job at the Chronicle; you can't trust cars this old with the guys in this town, I'm afraid."

Dean whimpered, causing Sam to squeeze his brother's shoulder. "At a time like this?"

"It's the least I can do for Dean allowing me to talk to him. I've told the police everything they need to know, Jo can answer some questions for a while. I'm sorry to say you can't used a chainsaw–" again Dean made a sad baying noise "–for this and risk cutting into the sheet metal, but it's pretty thin for a tree limb and doesn't look that heavy, maybe we could roll it. It'll scratch up the paint, but something has to give – Dean, _I'm so sorry_."

He shrugged, eyes glossy, growing increasingly numb to the world and would continue doing so as long as Black Beauty had a tree branch pinning her to the ground, an engine that was quite possibly broken beyond repair, and a connection with some kind of horrible creature he wanted nothing to do with. Especially if said creature was the thing Dean heard cackling, faintly like it was being carried on the breeze to him from a great distance, but cackling nonetheless.


	5. Five

**Chapter Five**

_**But a song once sung of thee still echoes through the dreary air;**_

The sun was beginning to set now, but the brothers wouldn't have noticed the fireball dipping below the roof lines of houses and businesses whether they wanted to or not: the heavy brown curtains of their motel room were closed so that they couldn't see out and, the concept they were going for, no one could see in.

It wasn't a very exciting thought, spending the night in a disgusting motel room in the middle of town – literally – where anyone with the bright idea of going anywhere would pass by, their shadowy forms passing by the curtains and their voices coming into the room through the one leaky window and crooked mold green door. But there wasn't any choice, really. With Black Beauty currently resting next to her twin in Trude's garage, locked away from woodland critters and strange people with an affinity for gawking and breathing a little _too_ heavily, the brothers Winchesters were stuck in a little nothing town in Ohio.

It wasn't really that bad, once they got past the stained carpeting, the greasy looking beds (at least there were two of them, though, to save some very awkward situations for a later date), the two lamps with their shades stained brown from cigarette smoke, the desk that was leaning at such a severe angle it was useful only for testing to see if gravity was still in check (which, after a test with a coin, proved true), and a cramped bathroom with a toilet that wouldn't stop running (the reason as to why Dean had slammed the door shut so hard it had shaken on its hinges), a sink with a noxious coating of toothpaste, soap scum, and the brothers didn't want to know what else, and a bathtub with a temperamental shower head and no hot water.

The mattresses were firm, yet lumpy, and it looked as though Joe Crede had recently stopped by, turned his head up, and spat his chewing tobacco onto the spotty once white ceiling tiles. The wallpaper was peeling and leaking some kind of nasty sludge at the creases and Dean was more than convinced this was all because he had flirted with the motel owner's daughter. Really, how was he suppose to know a good-looking girl like that was related to a wrinkly old-man with an eye patch?

But that wasn't what he was so angry about.

Actually, angry wasn't the proper adjective, neither was pissed off, enraged, irate, or anything else in the Thesaurus of Dean's mind – not that there were many synonyms in there to begin with. He was absolutely outraged, livid to the point of exploding like an overcooked Jiffy Pop popcorn pan, and slapping the sadness with the likeliness of a father with his child in the ICU ward didn't ease the flow of fuel to the fire.

What the hell kind of satanic monster would go after a poor, defenseless car? Sure, there were guns and holy odds and ends and monumental amounts of salt hidden in the trunk, but it wasn't like Black Beauty could sprout arms and use them.

Oh, fuck.

Dean stopped pacing just at the right moment to slam his knee into the edge of his motel room bed. He couldn't feel what pain there might have been, he was too incensed, heartbroken, worried to feel even the burning of a vampire's bite in the neck.

Looking at Sam, hunched over his laptop computer on his side of the room on his rank motel bed sheets, he quite evidently hadn't thought about the provisions still stashed away in Dean's Impala, the one that Trude offered to work on and towed away to her padlocked climate controlled garage and would at any moment find some very suspicious things if she acted on the whim of poking inside that spare tire compartment. For a college boy he wasn't very smart.

"We have a slight problem," Dean stated, as if he was Tom Thumb trapped in the stomach of a tramp dog.

Sam, face blue from the glow of the computer screen, put on his best let's-scare-Dean-to-death-with-seriousness expression. "Let her find the stuff in the trunk, Dean, because if we're messing with what I think we're messing with…let's just say that won't be a problem."

That cheerful statement flew right over Dean's pretty little head. "What do you mean, it won't be a problem? Finding shotguns in Beauty's trunk, wooden stakes, chains, and ropes I think constitutes as a _very big_ problem. Sammy, if we get hauled off to jail you can kiss ever finding Dad again good-bye and start actin' real friendly to your cellmate, which won't be me if have anything to do with because life in prison stuck three feet away from you – forget about it, the car rides are bad enough!"

Sam, grave as ever, turned his laptop in his brother's direction and scrolled to the top of the screen. "Tell me you don't find anything very wrong with that article, with her witness statements."

With the drapes pulled and no lamps on, the blue glow from the computer monitor took a few seconds for one to grow accustom with. Sitting down on the bed, taking the laptop away from Sam and setting it in his lap, Dean started skimming the newspaper article with a sigh: as far as he was concerned, at the moment nothing could be a bigger problem than the spire tire compartment and what would be found inside of it by curious eyes.

_Dober – At nine-fifteen p.m. Friday the 30th a frightened seven-year-old girl did what she was taught in school to do in an emergency: dial nine-one-one. The dispatcher, a man in his mid thirties and new on the job, was burdened with the task of having a call such as this one as his first go round._

_Dennis Beiver, the dispatcher to take the little girl's call that night, tells the Chronicle very clearly what happened. "I couldn't make out what she was saying at first," he explains. "Through the sobs and coughing, sputtering I could pick up a few words, but most of it was lost in translation. I had to tell her to calm down a few times, to take a deep breath or two and to tell me again what happened. She kept saying things like, 'He's killed them' and 'I saw him do it, I saw him, but you won't believe me because everyone else says he's imaginary but he's not, not, not." It was frightening because this was my first call and I didn't really know what to do, I thought I'd be dealing with a heart attack victim or something my first time, you know? But I did what they tell you to do in training and got her address – she was so young and shaken up, she didn't know it at first – and kept telling her to stay on the line until the police came._

_"I figured the only way I'd get her to not hang up on me was to try and get her to explain what happened, to tell me what she saw and if she could tell me who did it – help the police out a little, I thought. But that only made her into even more of a wreck and I felt really bad for that, so I changed subjects on her, you know, to get her mind off what happened. Puppies, she told me, she likes puppies, and her uncle's car – a model she can't really pronounce yet. She kept saying 'Johnny won't stop signing, you can hear it can't you?', but she wouldn't say who Johnny was and I couldn't hear anything other than her and the baby crying."_

_Why did this young dog and car loving little girl call Dennis Beiver? Because she had just witnessed her parents' death, the local police have just recently let tell. "Trude McFarland, eight came this Halloween morning," Deputy Sheriff Mark Hommes, 27, said in his press release, "was kept awake by the severe storm that hit us that Friday night. She was hiding under her blankets, singing over the thunder, when something ripped those blankets from her and there were her parents – very much alive but, she told us, something then killed them the moment the sheets were off her head. We've been put under scrutiny by the town for not apprehending this criminal, for not finding even the murder weapon, but there is no (murder weapon). This bastard used his hands," cont. C3_

Beside the article was a black-and-white photograph of the McFarland family as it once stood; Trude, a cute looking tot, Jo still in diapers, and their parents Marjorie and David, thirty and thirty-nine respectively. They were carving pumpkins at the annual harvest festival, only three days before the murder.

"Did you catch that, Dean?" Sam asked, as if his brother was stupid and didn't know what was going on. "'Eight came this Halloween morning' and this first murder happened one day before she was born. Actually, two hours and forty-five minutes before she was born – I looked her birth date up pretty easily, it was mentioned in the paper; David was a high-profile attorney. She was born at midnight on October 31st – Saimhan," he pronounced it _sow-en_. "That's Celtic New Year, a day in which, the Irish believed, the spirits of the people who had died that year would come back and look for living bodies to possess."

Dean raised his eyebrows and handed the laptop back to Sam. "Apparently she wasn't wearing her costume to scare those rude spirits off. I mean, really, it's not very nice to walk up to someone and say, 'I'm going to posses you now, do you mind?'"

"I'm serious here, Dean."

"Then we'll preform another exorcism and be done with it, quicker than pie, and get the hell out of here before the Secret Service decides it would be a good idea to rush us."

Sam, who had been lying on his stomach propped up by his elbows, moved himself into a sitting position. "And if it's not that easy? What if… what if this is a different kind of possession entirely? You've heard what was said in that gossip ring, what Anne rang off to us: Trude sees something that ought not be there. I do think a spirit came to her when that door was opened, you know what some people say about the hour between 11:00 and midnight, but I don't think it possessed her. If Trude was possessed, was walking around with someone else's spirit holed up inside of her for the past twenty-something years… it wouldn't appear for her, she wouldn't be able to see it, and you certainly wouldn't have that connection with her."

"Then what, prey tell, is going on here?"

"Honestly," Sam said, waving a hand in the air to indicate that he had absolutely no idea.

Dean huffed, rose to his feet and returned to pacing. "That's just great, it really is. All that money wasted on college and what has it given us? A fucking–" he mimicked Sam's hand waving with disdain. "My car is ruined and that's all you can give me? _I don't know_?"

For a few moments Sam didn't speak, was too busy gritting his teeth. "Maybe–" here Dean scoffed rather snidely "–maybe this spirit was assigned to her. What I mean is, it's certainly not an Average Joe who was simply looking for a warm place to stay in, a normal spirit wouldn't do that. So what if this thing, this 'Johnny' is from Hell? That would explain why it's been killing people all these years, why you get so freaked out when those connections are made. It was assigned to her, something like that, and in that spiritual hour on that extra special day it snuck into this world and latched onto her. It's taken on the form of this Johnny guy she was talking about, apparently a man she sees when she looks at it. Trude's not possessed, not in the traditional sense, but she's bound to this thing by one of the thickest ripcords imaginable."

"A devil wouldn't sing the Dreidel Song, Sammy."

"You said it yourself, you don't know the words to the song. Sure, it has the tune of the Dreidel Song, but Heaven knows what the lyrics are."

Dean shuddered at that thought of what those lyrics might be. "So how do we get rid of this thing before it drops Los Angeles on Beauty just to be funny?" The anger was coming back tenfold, boiling over and steaming from his ears.

Sam, slipping into meekness, twisted his face into one of the cousins of a grimace. "We cut the ripcord, of course."

Snapping his fingers, Dean made toward the door. "Salt bullets and holy water, a wooden cross and the Bible? We just need to get Trude away from that garage a while so we can break the lock and get in there, but how?"

"Dean."

He turned around, confused as to why Sam was still sitting on the bed with that I-just-ate-rancid-pork look on his face.

"Aren't you coming, Sammy? You know, the whole Two Amigos shtick we do?"

"You slept through English Literature, didn't you?"

Dean cast one of his trademark smiles. "Flirted with Cassie Umbrik, actually. Man, that girl was something else. Why?"

Sam shut his eyes, winced like someone was pulling at something deep within him. "'Two men, from opposite sides, bound together by a Siamese ripcord tethered to their souls. Who will pull first, knowing that it will destroy them both?'"


	6. Six

Credit where credit is due. The quote in the end of chapter five is from the following: The Offspring CD jacket of _Conspiracy of One_, page twelve. Yeah, Sam does not strike me as an Offspring fan so I just lied and threw in the English class remark. And if you don't know it, Google the Dreidel Song and if you're lucky you'll come across the same site I went to that actually plays the song and has the lyrics.

**Chapter Six**

_**Sweet verses that are no more still hang in the catacombs with the ghosts of lives once lived,**_

The shock of what Sam had just said purged all anger from Dean's system, turned the motel room to what it was on the other side of his black tinted lenses: just a normal, clean room with a few annoying problems. In his rage, as most of us do, Dean had blown the room's faults far out of proportion.

"That goes against everything, Sammy. We don't whack innocent people, that's not in our job description."

Sam was back to hunting for information on his computer, doing anything in his power not to face his brother. "We don't have a choice. This thing is killing people, has been since Trude was seven and maybe even before, and I don't see any sign of it stopping, do you? It went after your car, Dean, imagine what would have happened if we'd been in it."

The Winchester ghost busting team didn't kill people, innocent or guilty, and that was it. Blinded by this cold-hard fact, one written in blood since the moment the Winchester boys had started hunting all those years ago, Dean tried to talk Sam out of it. "How do you know it was this Johnny spirit? That was an old tree, the limb looked dead, how do you know it didn't just reach its time to snap off?"

"It made contact with you again, Dean. The first time Herb died, the second this demon dropped part of a tree on your car, what's going to happen the third time, the fourth? Do you know how many people have died, how many articles there are floating around the Internet about the killings? Minus Jo and Trude herself, her entire family is dead. Murdered right in front of her eyes by the demon's own hands, by his fingernails digging into them and gutting them like fish. She's a suspect, Dean, there are groups absolutely convinced Trude's doing this herself and they want her strapped down to a table and injected with death."

Sam finally looked up, but at the window behind Dean's left ear and not directly at him.

"We don't have any other option," he stated painfully. "I wish we did, I honestly do, but I don't see another one. There are only two doors here: either walk away and let this thing continue on its way or do something about it, stop it."

"But if there are people lobbying for her arrest, for a death sentence, she's going to die anyway – see you later, Johnny," Dean said with a motion of his hand, but nodded solemnly. "I know, I know: dignity. But… come on, Sammy, we can't do something like this. I won't do it! Kill one person so that this demon gets sent back to Hell, so that one other person can live. I don't see how that's worth it."

Sam let out such a deep sigh it shook his very foundation. "What do you propose we do, then? Drive off in your stupid Impala–"

Fire erupted from Dean's eyes, but Sam didn't even think about apologizing.

"–and let this demon kill Jo? What's going to happen after that, do you know? It might go after the whole town, the entire county and when it's done with that the rest of the state! There are so many other lives at risk with not doing anything, Dean, so many more including what might be the worst of all of them: the demon going after Trude when she reaches an expendable point. We can't sit back and do nothing. Dad wouldn't want us to drive off and put this problem behind us."

"Dad wouldn't want us to kill an innocent woman! God, Sammy, you of all people should know that. Say you were having premonitions of Jessica's death or kept seeing eerie little hints, would you have smothered her in her sleep weeks before she was set to light up like a fucking candle, when you weren't even positive it would happen like that? _Would Dad have done that with Mom if he didn't know for sure it was written in stone that would happen to her?_" Dean's face was red with passion. "I don't care what this fucking thing does, let it come after me for all I care, but we're not killing an innocent person. Do you understand me, Samuel? Do it yourself, poison her from ten states away, but I'm not having a single thing to do with this!"

Sam was off his bed by now – which _was_ lumpy, but not nearly so much as Dean thought in his earlier prickled state – and erected himself to his full height. "Of course Dad would have done that for Mom, of course I would have done that for Jessica! If you loved anyone at all, Dean, if you had even a scrap of heart in your body you would have done it too!"

And then Dean, for being such a self-absorbed overly-confident blonde, said the cruelest thing he could ever have mustered. "And if it wasn't inked down in God's golden book that Jessica was suppose to die like that? You would have killed her for nothing, Sam. Absolutely nothing."

"_But I could have saved her,"_ that's what Sam really wanted to scream at the top of his lungs, but he knew that Dean would never understand. Their father, Sam knew, would have said the same thing, but because Dean had never loved someone like Dad had, like Sam had, it was a nothing thing to say. So, as siblings often do to save the smallest morsel of pride, Sam shot that insult. "You'll never understand, Dean. You can talk until you're blue in the face, but you can never understand what it's like to love someone like that, to say without the slightest bit of hesitation that you'd become the next Atlas if it meant saving the person you love from that kind of pain, from having to feel pain like that for a second time if you were given the chance."

Somewhere in the fabric of time, of space, and the construction of the debate it had become far more than that. It was like being a kid all over again, having fights with Sam and then all of a sudden realizing what the fight was really about, what made up its core. It had always been about Dean, about how he had never been just quite human, how someone had been asleep on the assembly line in the factory and in the end he was constructed with one horribly important piece missing, and that piece was humility.

Dean wasn't quite empathetic enough when Sam had been kicked from the baseball team, hadn't been supportive enough when he was stood up on his very first prom night, and so many other things that in reality Dean had more than anything wanted to be, but he just couldn't. He had had to grow up way too fast, had flown by too many Growing Up Check Points, Sign In Here For Lesson Testing spots that it simply couldn't happen. And now came the hardest blow of all, the punch that Dean had been waiting the whole of his life for but never anticipated it coming to him here, in a small town in southeastern Ohio while arguing about killing Trude McFarland.

"All right," Dean started, speaking so loudly the vibrations in his throat weren't only more pronounced than usual but stung like nothing else before it. "I get it and you've won. I'm the blasted Tin Man and I'm never going to be getting my heart – I'll be like so many of those crazy Red and White Sox fans and have to wait until after I've died to finally get that medal. I'm not a human being, I'm not living, but taking up space and wasting more soundly constructed people's air. _I'm not good enough to be like you!_ Are you happy now? I said it, but that's not going to change the fact that I will not, cannot, off another human being who doesn't deserve it! Christ, Sammy, she has her whole life ahead of her and I'm not going to take that away from her and piss on it."

Sam picked up his laptop, tossed it to Dean and would have thanked his lucky stars for his brother being a good catch if he had not something more important to say. "Look at my notes, Dean, just look at them. More than one a year, some of them aren't even her blood relatives but her friends, the boys she was sweet on. Have you stopped to think that maybe, just maybe, she doesn't want to have her whole life ahead of her, after all she's had to see? I don't think she has a heart left, it's been broken so many times."

"That's so far beside the point the point is a filthy dot, not even."

"Is it?" Sam asked calmly.

Dean set the computer on his bed, sat down next to it and rubbed his temples with his elbows on his knees. "Can there be any other way? Can't she say some Hocus Pocus chant, dance around, and make it go away herself so that she doesn't have to die for Johnny to be vanquished?"

"That might not work."

"How do you know? How can you be so goddamn sure that the only way to take care of this is to kill her? There's a loophole somewhere, there's always a loophole, the trick is looking hard enough to find it."

Sam lowered himself back to the second bed with another structure rattling sigh. "I'm not sure. I'm not sure at all about this and that scares me beyond reason, but that ripcord could be like nothing we've ever seen before. It could be wound from the very fibers from Satan's robes and if that's the case the only way to be rid of Johnny, the only way to save Jo and Trude from a death akin to their parents' is to give Trude something quick, painless. We say what we need to say, spread what we need to spread, and put a little faith into it. We have to hope that once one end of the ripcord is destroyed the demon has but one way to go and with the things we'll read it can't ever come back. If it's been assigned to Trude since her birth, if she's its only lifeline, we have to sever it."

Pretending that Sam was wrong wasn't helping the situation and, though Dean was still deeply against taking the life of an innocent woman, he buried his face in his hands and said, "I wish there was a way to cut the cord without kicking her out of line and ripping up her concert tickets."

"So do I, but–"

The phone rang, giving both the boys a dreadful start; it was as if neither of them had ever heard a telephone ring before.

Dean was the one closest to the desk and, trying to laugh at himself for being so jumpy, walked over to the slanting piece of furniture and lifted the phone's receiver. "Hello, you've reached the Bates Motel, room number five. This is Norman speaking. Would you like a complimentary visit with mother?"

"Yes, you're by far the strangest grief counselor I've ever known," Trude replied, her tone flat and misguided.

Waving franticly at his brother to come to the phone and listen, Dean began to ooze subtle charm through the phone – it was an unconscious habit, did it with almost every woman he talked to over the phone. "I was the most handsome kid in my year, I can't help it if I'm hip."

"You must've gone to a very small school," Trude quipped stately. "Like me. I was the Valedictorian and there were only two of us, the other student having had been dropped on his head one too many times as a newborn."

Sam actually snickered, but that was before he was elbowed in the ribs by Dean. "I would've been beaten out by Jimmy Scrouse, but he was wearing a paper bag over his head that day: his hound bit off his nose, confused it for a hot dog."

Trude sputtered and coughed a few times, set something down in the background that sounded like a glass of something or other. "She's doing fine, Dean. Really beaten up, but apart from a damaged radiator, a scratched fender, and some other moderate repairs I think she'll make it through the night."

"Oh, thank God. I honestly don't know if I would've slept tonight if I hadn't heard that," Dean rushed out with a sigh of relief.

"She was lucky…." The line started to crackle and an equally spotty EVP jump out of the ear piece at them like a lion pouncing on a field mouse.

"_She's… forever… always and… forever mine… will die… stay away."_

Dean, wanting to slam the phone down with a "Can do, partner", pressed himself against Sam with the frightful idea that another connection was looming behind him about to smell the scent of his shampoo.

"Trude," Sam took over the phone. "Trude, we lost you there for a minute."

She had heard it, had picked up every word clear as a bell. "Who the hell are you guys? Why do you have all of those things in the Impala's trunk and…. Shit."

"Trude!" Dean yanked the phone from his brother's hands, dropped and fumbled with it for a second when it twirled out of his hands, and then pressed it to his ear. "Trude?"

"I'm very fond of my name, I'd appreciate you not wearing it out. Who the hell are you, Dean? If that's even your real name."

Dean nodded, but then realized that this phone wasn't one of those fancy video phones the trend followers in sci-fi movies use. "It's really my name and so is Sam's. Try not to freak out or anything, but… well, we're trying to help you, Trude. We're trying to help you and Jo."

"_Help_? You call making a very pissed off geist threaten to turn my sister inside out _help_?"

"He did what?" Sam asked, tugging the phone back between he and Dean. "Johnny did what, Trude?"

She paused, like she was about to ask where and when they had found out his name, but better judgment stacked against that act. "If you want to help, you'll stay away from Jo and I. Very far away. Don't worry about the car, I'll have someone drop it off for you when she's ready."

The connection was cut not by a mad demon, but by Trude herself. The dial tone droned in the brothers' ears as they stood there by the slanting desk wondering what they had just gotten themselves into because, as everyone knows, when someone tells one not to get into something one dives into that forbidden something with a running start and an elegant cannonball.


	7. Seven

**Chapter Seven**

_**A reminder of the soul once dancing through the graves with voice like rays of light.**_

It wasn't going to happen, plain and simple. Dean wasn't about to let something like this come to fruition, he wasn't going to spend the rest of his natural life wondering what else might have been done, if there really was a way to send this demon scum back to the filth from which he came without committing the act of murder. 

Sam must have slipped into a state of temporary insanity, that must have been it. All those nights without proper sleep had finally done him in and now here they were, standing in front of a concrete and steel garage about to attempt convincing a haunted woman to let them kill her.

Trude, for being completely and utterly blind to the concept that she had to die for Johnny to go away forever, was surprisingly cheerful over the intercom – an intercom, Jesus, this chick was five steps ahead of Dean in the Protection of Beloved Classic Cars department – that was until she realized who was on the other side of the door.

"If you thought, guys, that I would actually let you in here after what happened over the phone you're daft," Trude explained with a slight terror to her voice. "So far beyond daft, in fact, they haven't created a word for it yet."

Good, she didn't think the compartment filled with ghost busting equipment was worth mentioning. That or she was a damn good actress and was hiding behind that steel door waiting for the SWAT team to arrive because she had already called the police about it.

"Please," Sam said as he pressed down on the appropriate button, "if you could just let us explain ourselves. We're not leaving, so wherever you can make room for us…."

"You have a freaking shotgun in that car, I'm not letting you in here."

"We aren't bad people, Trude. I know it seems like it, but we really are just trying to help you and Jo," Sam said, trying that card again. "We… we hunt ghosts for a living, harmful spirits, and if you'd just let us in there to talk to you maybe we can figure out what to do about this."

Good, he was having second thoughts about slipping her something or whatever it was he was planning to do to her.

Trude scoffed. "Well, that explains all the salt you have stashed in there."

Dean decided his wait for his turn was over. "This is no laughing matter, Trude," he tried in a scoldingly stern voice like a father talking to a just-walked-into-the-house-an-hour-past-curfew son… a strangely succeeded. "Whether we come in there or not Jo is going to be badly hurt and if I were you I'd take my chances with letting us inside. I know you're doing this for her own protection but unless we can figure out a way to stop him, keeping us away from you isn't going to help anything or anyone."

There was silence on the other side of the door for quite a while, just long enough to make the brothers worry that Johnny was not only sadisticly e-ville but ridiculously impatient. But then there were scraping sounds coming from Trude's side of the door, a whole mess of them: she must have been undoing five more locks added to the key ends Dean had counted on his side of the steel slab of door, which then slowly slid open to the brothers' left.

"Just be glad Jo's having a class tonight and's out of his range," Trude muttered, clearly unhappy to even be taking this kind of a chance with fate. In her mind it must have been like expecting parents decorating every square inch of the nursery before the baby's born, in a way saying a big fat, "Go on, I dare you" to God.

Dean was the last one to enter the garage, would have been the first to speak if he hadn't run over to Black Beauty first and stroked her in a way Sam had never seen his brother do before: it was so loving it was downright creepy, so he turned around to address Trude who was pushing the door back into position. Being the gentleman that he was, he helped her to close the door and reengage all the locks.

"'His range'?" he asked, losing his mental count of the locks after six deadbolts. She certainly loved that car of hers.

"It's kind of like Phiip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy; the people's souls can only go a certain distance away from their humans before the pain sets in, unless of course the bond that ties them together is broken. With Johnny there is no pain, but it's like a wall of unbreakable glass, he can't go further than the fields in any direction," Trude explained calmly, more like she was giving a lecture about cow breeds than discussing an evil demon with a vice grip around her soul.

Sam nodded, soaking it all in and not liking the comparison just made because he had read those books long ago and still remembered how many of the children being put under that soul separating guillotine-like machine had died. Granted, some had lived including the main character and that was a shimmer of hope, but it was faint through a dense fog.

"That's why I've never moved," Trude interrupted Sam as he was about to speak. "As much as I want to, as much as I need to get away from this town and start a new life, I can't risk other people getting hurt. And that's why I baby that car so much," she added turning around with the younger Winchester brother to acknowledge Soft Top parked next to Black Beauty (and to look at Dean, who was still talking in sweet whispers to his baby, patting her and assessing her boo-boos more closely). "See, that was my Uncle Monty's car. Every Sunday afternoon when Jo and I were kids we would pile into her and take a drive around the county, went all the way to the lake once much to my parents' dismay. He was our guardian after our parents died and then when Johnny went after him the car was left to me."

"I read about that," Sam said gently. "You had just turned seventeen."

Trude hugged herself, still staring hard at her Impala. "In a way that hurt more than anyone else. I never really knew my parents, they were always working and by the time they got home it was like the house was an extension of the office building, the court room. Uncle Monty was always there when we needed him, though, whether Jo had the chicken pox or I wanted to bother him with a puppet show, advice about what I should do on a first date."

Dean was in the driver's seat by now, running his right hand across the leather upholstery and absolutely determined to choke-smother-wrap Beauty with the loving nothingness raining from his mouth. He was adjusting the side mirror, telling his first and only love how he was going to buy her a nice air freshener in her favorite scent when all was said and done and over with, when a face completely different than his own popped into the glass he was meddling with. Out of his surprise, Dean screamed and tried to put his hands out to protect Beauty, not caring to notice that she was much bigger than his arm span could ever dream of covering.

When the connections were made with Trude, when he could see that bastard demon hovering around by the shadow that passed over any kind of reflective surface, Dean had never stopped to ponder about what that might mean. Because he had never taken the time to dissect those shadowy forms he saw flirting with Trude's jewelry, with Soft Top's fine wax job, or with that gasoline puddle, he couldn't have known that it was more than possible he would be able to _see_ said bastard demon in anything that would cast a true reflection, like Black Beauty's side mirrors for example.

For whatever reason, Dean had been unknowingly cursed with the ability to tap into this freak's evilness, with the cord binding it and Trude together. It hadn't been enough that he could hear that song when Trude did as long as he was looking into her eyes, but adding this? This was far too much to handle.

Johnny, an honest vision cast to Dean by that damn safety mirror, looked like he had been Satan's dog's chew toy and because he wasn't rubbery or tasty enough had been spat back out. That was only evident in his eyes (human save for the fact they were black and led to nowhere), otherwise this demon could have swooned woman in circles around Dean. Isn't that always the way? The most evil pricks had to be the most handsome, the kind of handsome that would make Errol Flynn himself throw up his hands and hide beneath a rock for the rest of his afterlife.

The time between Johnny's coming and going took no time at all, Dean's heart hadn't even beat twice before the demon cracked a maniacal smile and went away. With a blink, his mouth still dropped open in faded scream, Dean saw himself again in the mirror.

"What is it, what happened?" Sam asked, running over to the car as Dean got out of it and marched to the back of it. He was closing the door Dean had left open, had just arrived at the trunk to see Dean lift open that spare tire compartment and gather the big shotgun, witness him load it with the rock salt like they were hunting the Hook Man again. "_What?_"

Dean was listening, but didn't want to waste precious ass kicking time in answering his brother's questions. He snapped the shotgun back into place and stepped back, turned around in a circle with gun at the ready and a wild look on his face. "Come on you, bastard! Is that all you can do, show yourself to me in a mirror like some pussy?" He cocked the gun for a kind of movie-esque emphasis to his insults. "_Show yourself you fucking asshole_. I'm not going to stand around here and wait for your dignified presence any longer. It's time you paid the fucking piper, Johnny!"

Trude had followed behind Sam, but was no longer in a state of worried awe to do anything. She was looking around her, petrified far past the point humanly possible. "What are you doing? Do you want to get yourself killed? Don't mess with him like that!"

"Like what?" Dean asked, moving away from Black Beauty in case he had to shoot the gun at too close a range to her. "I'm not messing with you, am I you fucking coward? Some demon you are, hiding behind a little girl all your life in order to stir a little death and destruction. What's the matter with you, did everyone in Hell know you still piss your bed and did this to you, bond you to Trude here, because they knew you couldn't do any better? You're no demon from the underworld, you can't even stand on your own two feet!"

Sam had taken up another gun and was trying to move a hysterical Trude away from Dean. He felt horribly uneasy about what Dean was doing, but he knew it would snow on the mountains of Hell before he could get a personality transplant for his brother.

"Stop it!" Trude screamed. "You don't want to do this, you don't want to make him angry!"

"Oh, but I do," Dean remarked with a smile. "What's the matter, Johnny boy, you cock shy? Aw, don't worry, Dean'll teach you not to be afraid."

Embarrassed was what Sam would have been had Trude not stopped yelling, had not buckled to the floor and pressed herself against one of Soft Top's tires with her hands over her ears. Her knees were up to her chest, her forehead pressed against them in a cheap imitation of a potato bug.

Sam turned to his brother, gun raised. "Dean, I think you should listen to her."

"_Show yourself you motherfucker!_"

Before one could say Vitameatavegamin, Johnny did as Dean had asked so rudely to do.

He appeared smack dab between the brothers, showing Sam why Trude was huddled away covering her ears. Johnny, taller than any basketball player, was screaming in tongues so loudly as to break crystal. The barrel of the shotgun Dean was holding bent with a metallic whine when Johnny grabbed hold of it, flung it and Dean across the room to slide across the floor and collide with a tool storage wall. The wall shook madly, causing an awl to fall point down a smidgen to the right of Dean's femoral artery, meeting the concrete between his legs in a violent kiss.

"You missed," Dean observed sourly, his back the victim of a numbing spasm that took too long to pass.


	8. Eight

**Chapter Eight**

_**A heart once given to thee has grown brittle beside thine corpse; without thee life is not worth living,**_

It was ten years, it seemed to Sam, before Dean struggled to his feet, apparently meaning to wave the now useless shotgun around like a club. He was bias, like he had been when the shape-shifter slammed his shoulder against a sewer pipe, and that sent a wave of panic crashing down upon Sam.

Tossing his brother the gun he had been holding, Sam spun around on his heel and crouched down before Trude, making it a point to hear every last swish and rub of leather jacket movement that came from Dean's general direction – and it didn't sound so good; he was making panting noises as he tried to steady himself and move around, the kind of panting sounds formed from painful groans escaping through clenched teeth.

"Trude, you need to get up," Sam told her, shouting over the demon's inane gibberish. "He wants you to be afraid and you're letting him win, you're giving him what he wants. Do you really want that, Trude, to let that whack job win?"

The woman deserved an Oscar for her potato bug performance, she really did.

Sam looked to his brother – at Dean, desperate to not show the pain he was in, confront Satan incarnate again – and then put his attention back on Trude, grabbing both her forearms with each hand. "I know you're scared," he sympathized. "I know you've been scared since you were small, but you need to look at me. C'mon, Trude, just look at me for once second."

Dean was only faintly aware of what little Sammy might have been up to, all he was focusing on what keeping the filthy sleaze uninterested in whatever was going on with his lifeline so that Sam could have a little time to make the smallest amount of progress possible. So he was throwing more insults, random tools, nuts and bolts, anything and everything to keep Johnny's back turned away from Soft Top's right rear tire.

"Christ, Trude, stop acting like a child! Cowering like this is what got your Uncle Monty killed and it's going to do the same thing to Dean and your sister if you don't _look at me_!" Those words and how he said them frightened Sam, but not nearly as much as the thought of facing a day without his brother beside him. That page was bleak and it wasn't going to become a reality if he could help it.

To Dean his world was now comprised of Johnny and nothing more, nothing less. Those specter's eyes were the very gateway to the underworld, of that he was more than convinced. They bored through his flesh, right down to his soul and it hurt, physically hurt, like nothing he could ever describe. Johnny stopped his speaking in tongues to laugh – a booming, echoing thing that frosted Dean's heart.

"'God'," the geist began in a horrific mocking tone. "'God, You give my brother a life, friends and a woman to love him'–" demon made an obscene gesture with his hand and section of anatomy Dean had not ever thought of doing before, during, or after his childish tantrum "–'but You leave me with nothing. Why can't I ever be happy like him, why won't You let me be whole like Sam?"

Dean sneered, fired the revolver at the paranormal being (which did nothing though it hit the specter dead center in the chest) and spat. "That's not what I meant by 'love', you disgusting asshole fuck."

Sam put being touched by his brother's wish to the back of his mind: currently he had bigger fish to fry. Trude still wasn't cooperating, though her hands were limp by her ears and the whole rest of her body seemed to have joined those hands into the land of looseness.

"Stand up to it, Trude. Stop being such a coward and stand up to it! Do it for your sister, Trude, give Jo a fighting chance."

Nothing.

"Is this it, Trude? You're just going to huddle here and hide behind your knees, wait for this moment to be over so you can breathe again? Is this how you show your love for your sister, Trude? Is this how you tell Jo you love her? I have news for you, darling, this isn't love. You don't love Jo and you never have, have you? You're failing her, Trude, your failing Jo and your parents, your Uncle Monty and everyone else you've let die. You uncle would be so disappointed in you if he knew you were pressed up against that tire like the stinking coward you are, Trude, he'd be so crushed to know you don't love your own sister, that you'd let Jo die while you hid in a dark corner. What would he say, Trude, when he learned the beloved neice he gave his Impala to would watch her own sister be filleted and do nothing to help her? He'd be sick, Trude, sick to his stomach to learn that."

Finally, some headway. Trude dropped her hands from her face, wrapped them around her legs and looked up at Sam. "You don't understand, there's nothing I can do. I've tried so many times, I've tried fighting back but nothing I ever do will stop him."

"I don't care," Sam said sharply. "Excuses aren't good enough and neither is giving up. If you loved your sister at all you would be trying to help her, trying to bring Johnny down and not sitting there like a bump on a log."

"Don't you think I've run down the list already? Nothing helps, nothing. I don't know what you have in your mind for me to do, but chances are I've already done it and as you can see it hasn't done any good."

Sam was yelling, only because he was in hysterics and had no sense of consciousness about what he was doing. "That's my brother over there, Trude! You've got to try again, a million times if you have to, until you can't do it anymore, but you've got to do _something_!"

"He isn't your normal ghost, Sam. He's not anything like whatever you and Dean have taken care of before," Trude expounded meekly. "The more I protest, the more I try to fight him, the stronger he gets."

"Then I guess the time of being selfish is over!"

Trude knew exactly what he meant by that and whatever progress had been made was rapidly washed back into the sea with the tide. "That was above the crease of my list," she hissed through the tremors wracking her voice, and quickly went back to being the human bug.

"Trude? Goddammit, Sammy, why couldn't you have let the grief counselor handle that one?" But the last string of words was brutally castrated.

What Sam had dreaded, what he had been silently praying against, began to happen solely to spite him. The yarn ball was unraveling and he couldn't run fast enough to stop it, couldn't throw anything in its path to make its rolling cease.

Dean had made a gruff choking gurgle he hadn't meant to have let happen, especially not in the middle of his sentence. When Sam turned around what was left of his soul seemed to fall to his feet in a loud tinkle-crash-banging mess about him – Johnny had one large hand wrapped tightly around his brother's throat, was _lifting_ him off the ground. The guns met the concrete floor with equally distressing thuds.

Full-Blown Hysteria, population one: Samuel Winchester. He got to his feet, utterly forgetting about Trude and her resistance to fight, and ran over to his brother, his last link to sanity, to life. He fought with both hands to free Dean from the specter's grasp. It was pointless, the thing wasn't a solid being, but Sam was boiling over with desperation by now, and nothing seemed impossible.

It would also have been idiotic to think that Dean's windpipe wasn't being crushed, that if this demon slime didn't release its grip within the next five seconds – four, three – Dean would by some miracle not fall to the garage floor in a lifeless heap. But Sam thought it anyway, thought it with so much of his heart the muscle seemed to ache and burst at the seams. It was even more dunce-like to not run over to Black Beauty's trunk and grab up a handsful of weapons, but when one's sibling is being choked to an inch of their life rational thinking flies on the same path as the lovely Icarus.

Dean was thrashing his legs, twisting and turning and torquing his body – a rather stupid thing to do when he was being cut deathly short of oxygen – but he wanted to live. He might have been insanely jealous of his younger brother and might not have ever considered himself a whole human being, but by God he wanted to live.

The geist raised his free hand, waved his fingers and smiled (Sam had tears streaming down his face now, was making strained screaming sounds in his worthless efforts of freeing his brother while that brother was oddly thankful in the enveloping blackness to hear the demon sing, to learn the words of that damned song).

"Oh, Trude Trude Trude," the demon sang cheerfully like some diseased in the mind Jewish child at Hanukkah playing the game during which the Dreidel Song is sung, "come see what I have done. And if you hurry to get there, you'll have lots of fun."

It was going to happen. Sam was going to lose his brother too and then he'd have to kill himself, there was just no way he could survive in the world without Dean. He thought about sex too often, had been injected with an overdose of testosterone and arrogance at birth, but he was still Sam's brother and the knobby jointed geek loved him for that, for every last thing Dean had ever done whether good or bad or just plain stupid. It was going to happen, the evil geist with a bone to pick was going to gut Dean alive with his fingernails and that would be the end of that. Their father would understand, would simply nod his head and say, "Sammy just couldn't live an hour without his brother there, he just loved him too much" and throw a white rose onto his coffin.

And that image was so clear in Sam's head that even though he had thought he couldn't cry any more, hadn't even been aware of his own _risse_ to begin with, found the tears breaking through the dam at a more steady pace. Dean wasn't suppose to die, not like this and not ever, he was suppose to grow old with Sam and have to suffer through his little brother's incessant whining to drive Black Beauty for all of eternity. It was suppose to happen like that or some equally comical old men badgering portrait, but not like this. Not at all like this.

A "No!" came floating through the air, a shrill note in the House of Horrors that Sam was confused about making because his voice couldn't go that high and he couldn't remember having opened his mouth to speak.

Johnny cackled, turned to face his beating heart, and inadvertently loosened his grip ever so slightly on Dean's neck though the many a-proclaimed heartthrob's eyes rolled to the back of his head with legs now passive. Sam was reduced to a series of blubbering "Oh, God"s.

"We've been through this many times, dear Trude," the demon pointed out casually. "Your little protests have helped no one before."

"Strangers! They're absolute strangers!"

Dean was dropped to the ground, crumpled on his side much like a forsaken rag doll, and his brother knelt beside him. It was probably a bad thing to shake a man who had so recently been choked, to yell his name and pat his cheeks and shake his head to and fro, but try telling that to Sam.

"They're meddling in our affairs, Trude," Johnny stated simply, "especially this once." His foot passed through Dean's hand, but not without bringing a gagged and ragged scream from the man – but to Sam a broken left hand meant a God sent sign of life. "Stop your crying and get to your place, love."

So much for being ghost hunters, neither were currently in a right state to whack a few goolies. Dean was lying half-dead on the floor with a now shattered left hand and Sam was bawling like a newborn over the half-dead part of the equation – because half-dead also meant half-alive and half-alive meant a life void of even more agonizing lonliness and despair.


	9. Nine

**Chapter Nine**

_**But then thine soul in shape of a white butterfly waltzes through the darkness, my sweet little lullaby.**_

Someone somewhere once said that life is what you make it. That person could have been the Dahlia Lama or maybe a gas station worker with a bald spot sick of running through a never ending play of filling up tanks, in rain sleet snow or hail. To Dean it was much more realistic and comforting to take off with the latter, to believe that at one point in time a guy named… Guy was so unhappy about going outside in a thunderstorm to fill up an old woman's Coupe De Ville he muttered "Life is what you make it" while he was being drenched to the bone, grease washing into his eyes as he stood waiting for the nearsighted granny with shotty glasses to find that last nickel in her coin purse.

Life really is what you make it, Dean supposed, and as he lay sputtering on the floor he wished he could meet this Guy and shake his hand. He also hoped the gas station employee wasn't a lefty who liked to sing Hymns.

It was almost humorous the spot Dean was in. His throat felt like it had been burnt raw and every time he took a gasping inhalation the fire erupted again, he was almost positive he would blow fire like some kind of freakish human dragon. That made him laugh, imagining himself spitting fire, and even if he didn't laugh he'd still be propelled into a coughing fit. His beautiful, studly lungs were going to come flying out of his mouth along with a swollen throat with its bowler hat and suitcase if he didn't stop his coughing. When his spell eventually did subside he needed oxygen again, lots of it, and that brought him back to stage one.

If that's what if felt like to breathe, he wasn't going to try to speak anytime soon. But maybe he could roll over and silently reprimand Sam for slapping him across the face; his cheeks hurt almost as much as his back and hand, and speaking of hand–

No, rolling over was most definitely a bad idea.

Pain shot up his arm, white hot searing pain that made stars fly across his line of vision. It was enough to make Dean yelp and collapse back to his right side, rap his head on the pavement for the second time since that demon prick let go of him. He was in a fine mess and the thought of not being able to drive his Beauty, of having to let Sam take the wheel, made him groan – or at least try to, his throat hurt so much.

He was going to cast a pathetic longing glance at his baby, but when he moved his eyes toward the car he couldn't see it. Not because it had suddenly disappeared, though the thought did streak in and out of Dean's hazy mind, but because his view of the car was being blocked by Johnny and Trude.

It made his headache worse trying to watch what was going on, made his head absolutely pound when he squinted in efforts to speed up his recharging ability to see, but shutting his eyes and going to sleep wasn't an option. Sam would think him dead if he gave in to how tired he was, if he simply closed his eyes to block out all the stimuli attacking his brain and overwhelming him. If Sam thought Dean was dead he'd be slapped and jostled again, upping his pain tenfold. So, as not to be treated like a bottle of chocolate milk for a second time, Dean wormed his way closer to his brother and buried his face by his knee, then shut his eyes because if he didn't he'd make himself sick studying the pattern of Sammy's jeans at such a close range.

Sweet blackness, he never thought he'd want to say that again, but it really was a relief to pare down his senses to feeling and hearing. He didn't want to have to listen to this, though. Maybe one of his Led Zeppelin tapes – yeah, a Whole Lotta Love would fix him right up – but not this.

What Dean was hearing but not seeing was Trude finally, if not reluctantly, taking a stand and Sam sitting dazed and thankful beside him as the college nerd tried to collect himself. He had the gun in his possession again, but what kind of good would that do?

Sam was staring down at the revolver, playing with it in his hands like it was his first time ever seeing one. He had loaded it with real bullets, not rock salt blocks like Dean had outfitted the shotgun with, but he couldn't remember why he had done that. When his brother had fired it, taking the count of the full barrel down by one, it had gone straight through the specter and into the garage's thermostat on the south wall (which he just noticed was always kept at a comfortable sixty-eight degrees). Bullets did nothing to a geist with the density of fog.

Wait a minute. _Density_. Yeah, density, that's the ticket!

Unable to stand up because of Dean's face crunched up against his leg, Sam waved his gun around to gain Trude's attention – who for some strange reason was slipping into her conversation with Johnny a game they used to play when she was young. Unbeknownced to Sam, Trude had gotten the same bright idea that had just struck him, only far earlier when she saw the broken plastic of the thermostat behind Sam's head when he was yelling at her. She had been convinced it wouldn't work, would be yet another notch of failure on her belt, but since Sam said she had got to do _something…._

"You're right, Johnny, I know they're taking shovels and axes to something they shouldn't, but we hardly know them. We both know how you work: you don't kill strange people," Trude explained in a newly found tone of voice, like a teacher speaking to a little child. "You try to scare them within an inch of their lives, like when you did when I was little, but you never kill them. That's not what you do." That's what she had been saying when Sam started waving at her like a lunatic.

"Trude, dear, you're doing it again. You're convinced you can stop me, but you know very well that for all your efforts you're just going to have the rubberneck's blood all over you. I hope you don't catch something, Lucifer knows where he's been."

Dean called out in protest, wanted to point out that he might have had a ratio of ninety percent skull to ten percent brain but he wasn't _that_ stupid. Unfortunately with his traumatized throat and the position his face was in the neighing he made was hardly audible.

The gun needed to be re-cocked. The sinking sensation Sam was feeling, the "Oh, no" running through him because cocking a revolver wasn't exactly a silent task, prevented him from reacting to the geist's remark.

"I know, I know," Trude said in a bored manner. "That's what I was trying to tell them, but obviously they're not the strangest noose in the barn. Still, strangers aren't on your hit-list and you'd be losing your cool if you strayed away from that, wouldn't you?"

Johnny had one single plus against all his minuses: he took what Trude said into consideration. "Actually, I think it would drive a little life into me, make me a little more formidable."

There it was, the window of opportunity she had been waiting for. "You know you don't need to kill a couple of strange men – who, by the way, are bound to be thrown in jail for the rest of their lives eventually – to become more formidable. Remember, Johnny, when I was little? You'd make yourself solid and then disappear, terrify the other kids because you knew no one would believe them if they told. That's awe inspiring enough, don't you think? I mean," she laughed, "offing a couple strangers is nothing compared to solidifying and showing your true form."

The demon tilted its head, but said nothing.

Sam was slowly, slowly readying the gun. Luckily, either intentionally or not, Dean lapsed into another coughing fit loud enough to mask the _click!_ of the revolver cocking. He smiled down at his brother, who nodded weakly with a lopsided grin.

"You haven't done it in years, though," Trude observed carefully. "I don't think you can do it anymore. Your memory's gotten spotty and you've forgotten. In that case, go ahead…." And she waved a hand at the Winchester brothers.

Even demons from Hell have egos, very big fragile ones in fact.

Johnny puffed himself up, not that he needed to. "Now, just you wait a minute! Who says I've forgotten anything? You've forgotten who I am, child!"

Trude made a spot on recreation of the teenager born eye rolling, head cocking, eyebrow raising one shoulder shrug. "I know," she said, blandly, throwing up her hands. "'The great Archangel's right hand man, blah-blah-blaah'."

Dean hoped Trude would make it through this, she was anything but a columnist for a local newspaper. Deep down, though, he wanted to be able to arrange a marriage between Soft Top and his Black Beauty. They'd have to do it in San Fransisco, of course, in a church with a massive dehumidafier.

The specter snorted in revulsion to Trude's lackluster response. "That's right, dear Trude. I forget _nothing_, I'm–"

"Worse than Hybris," Trude quipped dryly. "Really, for a demon you have some very deep seeded emotion issues."

Letting out an angry scream, one scary enough to make Trude shriek and she was the one trying to fool the thing, the geist whirled around to face the brothers. That wouldn't have been so bad had the demon looked like Johnny, the painfully handsome evil villain, and not like…. Oh, God, there was just too much fowlness to clip a name to.

It was certainly of a solid form now, but Sam had to shut his eyes and turn his head away for any hope of saving even the smallest amount of his sanity. He had never understood the phrase "so frightening as to make a man go daft" but, boy howdy, did he ever understand it now.

Even in his worse nightmares as a child, as an adult, Sam's mind had never been able to conjure up something as frightening as Johnny's true form. That fact alone was enough to start him screaming. That there could something in the world so terrifyingly ugly, so downright hideous that the human imagination _could not_ come even remotely close to was beyond comprehension and all forms of insanity. A schizophrenic in his worst delusions couldn't create something as monstrous as the thing lumbering toward the brothers.

The floor was shaking, actually shaking, as the _thing_ (it looked like no animal or human or combination of the two) took impossibly large strides over to the other side of the garage, over to the shivering from fear Sam and the very confused but not wanting to ask Dean. It seemed like no time at all before Sam felt hot breath on the left side of his face, smelt the stench of sulfur and death and blackness so disgustingly strong as to make him gag.

But there was a part of Sam that wasn't screaming (whether it was just in his head or out loud, he didn't stop to care about), that wasn't leaning his body back to shelter his still wheezing-sputtering-coughing brother with a shattered hand. There was a part of Sam that was still on a planet earth filled with evil he needed to protect people from, still a part of him that consciously raised the revolver and emptied four bullets into the very heart of the creature that most definitely embodied every last speck of evil on Sam's earth. Four bullets; one for his mother, one for his whereabouts unknown father, one for Jessica, and one for Dean because Dean would have shot the thing for trying to make him a corpse (a damn handsome one, but a corpse all the same).

With his eyes still closed and body still turned in a makeshift shield covering his brother Sam wasn't able to see Satan's main squeeze explode into black flame – of all things, black flame – and pitch backward into an endless pit that opened up under the main portrait of villainy, a pit that closed without a trace of its existence soon after.

A decade later Sam, wondering why he wasn't demon meat by now, opened one eye and came to the realization that his right arm had gone numb on him. He was still holding the gun up high with finger poised on the trigger. Maybe it was out of shock he dropped it and looked down at Dean.

"What," the almost brunette was trying to say, but with voice failing him and a throat being strained he gave up – more like had to, Sam wouldn't let him speak.

"Don't try to talk," he demanded lightly. "I don't know what happened, I had my eyes closed through the whole thing."

Dean let his trademark smile shine, without words telling his brother all he needed to know.

"Shut up," Sam said, smirking softly. "I didn't exactly feel you take your face out of my leg, I bet I'll forever have your face mark there. Just what I need," he added sarcastically.

Wriggling away from his geek brother, Dean used his unbroken hand this time in trying to roll over and get up. Every bone in his body ached, his head felt like one big pulsing vein, but he managed to get himself on his knees with his right hand on the floor to prop him up. When he saw that Sam wasn't hurting himself in rushing over to Dean's aid, he looked behind him and threw a dirty look.

Intimidation helped nothing, Sam wasn't even looking at him – how rude – but over at the cars.

Dean sighed, coughed a few times because he sighed, and slowly turned and lifted his head to look at whatever it was that fascinated Sam so much. What Dean saw added salt to all his wounds.

Trude was sitting on the hood of Soft Top, which wasn't so bad, but what was was _how_ she was sitting: hunched over with her head down and a hand to her chest, over a large red stain on her white Remmington Arms t-shirt, right above her heart.

&&&

"So do I look sexy with my hand done up like this? Be honest with me now," Dean requested with a smile, looking out of Black Beauty's passenger window at his visitors.

He still had the hand mark bruises around his neck, though they were close to gone now, and his left hand wasn't done healing quite yet which meant he wouldn't drive (well, he could, but Sam wouldn't hear of it). But it could have been worse, he could have his hand back in that contraption on loan from Pin Head, the one they put it in when he was in the hospital so that the pins would stay where they needed to.

Jo grinned and leaned into the car almost nose to nose with Dean. "You'll always look sexy to me, babe, but make sure you come by when your hand's all better. I'll give you a manicure."

A hand came in through the window, gently yanked Jo out of the car by her shoulder. It was Trude, laughing softy. "Enough, Jo, I don't think he wants to be your guinea pig."

Trude recently had the stitches removed from her chest (deep cut-like wounds, but they hadn't been life threatening) and she now seemed like a totally different woman from the one Sam and Dean had met. Her eyes were clearer, in a sense, then they had ever been before and she appeared to operate like a normal human being for the first time in her life. However, she no longer dreamed at all – only complete blackness, she explained – and had lost most if not all of her personality after what had happened. So, yes, she really was a different woman than the one who had strolled up behind Dean that day with the comment about Beauty's value being killed.

She and Jo were going to go on a road trip to Montreal, Canada when Little Blondie came to spring break. Trude had lost her job (she couldn't write anymore and even if she could, concentration was now only a word in the dictionary) and felt like the two needed a little sister bonding time.

But for all the loses that came with Johnny being sent back to where he belonged, Trude couldn't have thanked the Winchester brothers enough for what they had done. She had, Dean thanked God for, not lost her know-how with cars and invited the brothers to stop by her garage if they ever found themselves in whichever city Trude had decided to move to. She was getting her fresh start after all those years and if the Winchester boys didn't hurry up they would miss theirs.

Life is what you make it, Guy the disgruntled gas station attending once said. Dean was fairly sure that if that Coupe De Ville driving grandmother had taken more time in her search of a nickel so she would have exact change Guy would have also muttered, "And there comes a point when you're too far into the blueprints to switch plans" in that downpour.

So with some heartfelt good-byes, off the Winchester brothers went down the line of the lives they had built. But unlike what Guy might have added to his rant that become a mantra of wisdom, Dean knew that sometimes lives can become damaged; pipes can spring leaks, making a nasty yellow water stain appear on your bedroom ceiling. The trick is to replace that pipe and fix up the water stain without tearing down the rest of your beautiful Victorian house because, sometimes, we run into things that we may not like but we still love our home even though it might have a drafty attic or a slanting foundation.

Dean wasn't one to read like the fortune in a fortune cookie, and those thoughts confused him. He had never liked metaphors and thinking about them and blueprints and water stains made him get a tension headache. Or maybe that was because of the way Sam was driving.

"Be careful," he started pestering three miles down the interstate. "She doesn't like it when you go against her. Just relax and flow _with_ her and, jeez, stop being so stiff with the steering wheel. She's just like any other woman, Sammy, and doesn't appreciate being treated like how you're treating her. You're not five and playing the racing game at Chuck E. Cheese's, here."

Sam scowled at the bumper of the car in front of him. "If you don't stop that, so help me… I'll break your other hand."

"I'm just saying, Sammy," Dean said as he swapped out tapes in the player. "Gentle."

"Yeah. Gentle. Uh-huh."

Dean looked up at his brother. "You never did appreciate her."

"It's just a car, Dean."

He gaped, put a hand to Beauty's heating vents. "Don't you ever say that again, Sammy! You hurt her feelings!"

Sam actually giggle-snorted.

"I find nothing funny about insulting a beautiful car."

Now he was laughing.

"Sammy, being mean to a classic is not amusing! Stop laughing, your eyes'll get watery and you won't be able to see what your doing."

Make that howling.

Dean glowered. "Sam, this is _not_ funny!"

"I take it back," Sam said when he had quelled his laughter enough to speak.

"Good, but don't say that to me. You need to say that Beauty. Sammy, tell her you're sorry."

Sam shook his head, smiling. "Not about that, I still think it's just a car. I take back what I said about you not having a scrap of heart in your body, about not being able to understand what it's like to love someone."

"Thank you," Dean grumbled though there was earnest in his words. "That means a lot to me, Sammy, it really does."

**_Curtain._**


End file.
